turning Japanese

Actually, the Japs are turning into us, only moreso. It seems that adoption of the Anglo-American model of competition and individual pursuit of promotion is having a disproportionately greater effect in Japan, where tradition dictated knowing your place in the team. And singing company songs, of course.

My usual immediate cheap shot would be denigrate the Washington Consensus model, but dammit, if Richard Stiglitz can turn apostate, why can't 'umble observers make a few similar observations. Of course the world is more complicated than this and it will be interesting to see whether any counterfactual evidence emerges from Japan or whether other factors are identified.

My theory of people's almost infinite capacity to absorb change, in particular in the workplace, should lead to saying something like "so what" to news such as that from Japan. I think people do find ways to get around or subvert the system, but then I've never worked on a chicken plucking production line. I don't know how you subvert that.

On a kind of similar note, there was a letter to the editor in yesterday's AFR from a young lawyer lambasting the culture of chasing billable hours, the heavy workloads this produces and the effect on work/home life. In today's edition there is a reply from an evidently more successful - or perhaps more driven - young lawyer arguing that yesterday's correspondent is obviously a failure and that the recent rise in such complaints is evidence of those will never make the grade because they're not good enough, so they just moan about the situation.

When I read today's letter, my first response was "maybe you shoud wait until you've matured a bit and you might see that different people hold different values and yours are not necessarily superior to the others, and yours might even change over time." And then I thought that I wouldn't want to be a client of a firm where an insufferably arrogant young lawyer valued maximising the firm's billable hours over providing the best service to the client.

We are all individuals.